Bridging the Gap: How Enablement Empowers CS Teams to Drive Growth

To your point, yes. CSMs were never given that sales training. I think enablement needs to include what we just described that the sales team gets. So that I think CSM’s the focus is on like, okay, you need to learn the platform and be the expert on the platform. So it’s almost like it’s like an engineer. You need to understand the back engine of things and everything else and understand how it works as it relates to the user interface. But you’re not talking about the value proposition, how we compare to our competitors. You don’t know any of that. So I’m not saying that CSMs don’t get some of that in sales in the enablement, internal enablement when they join a company, but it’s to a much lesser extent. So I would say it definitely needs to include both the pre-sales side and the post-sales side to be better at being able to do what this new defined role is for a CS. Welcome to the CS RevSpeak Podcast, where we talk about practical insights, strategies, and frameworks that will help customer success leaders who carry a revenue number, drive sustainable growth, maximize customer lifetime value, and crush their numbers.

Hi, everybody. This is Angeline, host of the CS RevSpeak Podcast. And today I’m joined by Gina Patel, an accomplished customer success leader with a proven track record of building and scaling CS teams to drive retention, growth, and operational efficiency. Welcome to the show, Gina. Thank you. Thank you. It’s great to have you here. And I know this discussion is going to be packed with valuable takeaways, but let’s get started with an intro. Can you share your background with our audience? What led you into customer success and what are you focused on today? Yeah, happy to. My name is Gina Patel. I’ve been in the customer success space for about 15 years. So I guess you could say I’m one of the pioneers. I started my work experience in management consulting. So I worked for Booz Allen on the East Coast and did government consulting. And then I went to business school. And when I came back, I really wanted to shift away from consulting, but I wanted to identify an opportunity that would really help leverage the skills that I learned for the seven years I was at Booz Allen.

And I thought customer success was a great position to be in because I was able to customer success oftentimes are bridging the gaps between what a platform provides and what they can’t provide, or at least what they can’t provide yet based on customer needs. And I worked for a company called Decision Lens, and they were a strategic prioritization solution. So I was doing a lot of facilitation, helping government customers predominantly understand how to leverage the platform in the best way possible. So looking at best practices to really help them construct a really good decision model in this platform that we sold. I was employee number 35 and wore multiple hats. So had the opportunity to really manage our customers, grow our customers, act as a sales engineer, as act as an account manager, which was separate from a customer success manager, but really identified those organic upsell opportunities for customers that I had been fostering the relationship for for two years, three years, four years.

I spent 15 years in DC and decided to call it quits and move back west. I wanted a different lifestyle, something that was more weather conducive. And I would say for the past eight years, I’ve been in the Los Angeles area. I’ve been focusing really on platforms. So software is a solution that have focused on data intelligence, leading customer success teams, and really just utilizing what I’ve learned as someone who’s been an IC. So I am not someone who’s a leader who’s never been a customer success manager. I really do empathize with my customers. I’m passionate about customers. I like talking to people, working with people, seeing them get success out of something that I believe in. So all the companies that I worked for have really believed in. And I love when a customer loves us just as much as I love the company I work for. I can totally relate with that, especially there’s a lot of startups right now.

There’s a gazillion of new platforms and SaaS coming out in the market. And that’s also often my criteria when choosing a company to work for. I need to believe in the product or the mission that they have that resonates with me. I’m very curious. So how did that transition go? Was it a smooth transition coming from booze, Alan, to your first CS role? Do you feel like it was a natural transition, basically? Or did you have to learn a lot on the fly? Yes, I think the business model of software is something that I definitely had to learn. But I think the actual activities that I was doing in support of customers. So the post-sales, you become a customer, you kick them off, you onboard them, you’d provide training for them throughout the course of their subscription, their year, multi-year contract with us, you have business reviews with them, you have these strategic conversations with them.

I think all of those things came very natural to me because I had some strong consulting skills. I worked for the organizational design change management team at Booz Allen. So change management was something that I really focused on. And so being able to do that for customers in a different capacity wasn’t that hard. I also think that anyone who’s worked for me would probably say that I use the word consulting a lot in terms of my approach for my team. So all my customer success teams, I always tell them, I want you to act, be that consultative person for your customers. You are constantly trying to do discovery, ask the right questions, help drive value for your customers for what they’ve purchased from us. I think of us as consultants, but just in a different capacity. That’s true. I think that’s a great mindset to have because in order for you to advise your customers, steering them in the right direction, you have to put on that consultative hat, like you mentioned, and discover more about their needs, their use cases, and so on, and which is something that customer success managers do on a day-to-day basis.

Walk me through from your first customer success experience, that transition to leading teams. How did that journey go for you? At DecisionLens, I was there for, I’m a loyalist. I have a good long trajectory with most companies that I work for. With Decision Lens, I was there for seven years. I was a senior CSM and then an associate director where I managed a small team and then a director and managed a larger team. That then, when I moved to Los Angeles, I started a job with a company called Tubular Labs. And I basically managed their team in North America, and we covered all our customers in North America and Latem. And that team was about somewhere between eight and 10 people. And it’s a natural thing for me because at Booz Allen, I was a people manager. So I managed a multi-million dollar project. I had a team of five to six. I managed how much we were billing it from an hour perspective and what our profit margin was.

I think Booz Allen gave me a lot of training to really focus on people management courses, including public presentation classes. And I think I got a lot out of working there in my 20s. And as a result, I’ve had a lot of good feedback from a lot of people that worked with me and for me, both during my management consulting days and then even in tech about how I’m a really good people mentor. I’ve coached a lot of CSMs, I’ve promoted them, I’ve elevated them, I’ve helped them, and I’ve seen that growth in them. And Tubular was no different. I coached and mentored ones that weren’t doing so well when I joined, and they were on the cusp of being on a performance improvement plan. Some were and they graduated, surprisingly, I mean, because that’s the intent, right? You put someone on a performance improvement plan, but you want them to graduate from that and succeed. And then there were others that just needed some like really good constructive feedback to kind of understand what they’re not doing well and what they are doing well to help elevate their ability to get that promotion, to get the multiple promotions to get to where they want to get to in their career.

After Tubular, I got my VP role with Pathematics, which was a marketing intelligence company that then got acquired about six months after I started by Sensor Tower. So think of a $20 million company got acquired by a $30 million company. When I left earlier this year, they were a $100 million company. And I had a team of five, and then that grew to almost 30 globally. Most of my CSMs were in the United States, but I had a team of about seven in AMIA. And then I was a dotted line to the CSMs in APAC. They didn’t directly report to me, just given accessibility to a manager, I think is important. And I think the time zones weren’t very conducive for that. So I put a lot of processes and procedures in place, and that was then shared with the APAC team. So important because I think a lot of CS teams work with global customers, and it’s not very unique to see that CSMs are spread out across geographical regions as well.

And I myself I am based in Vietnam, but I typically work with CSMs that are based everywhere in the globe because we want to be able to service customers at their time zones. So yes, well, you’ve been in customer success for 15 or so years, and uh CS is really relatively still a young profession, but I do believe that it has progressed and evolved so much in the past decade. So I’m curious as to how did you see that play out across the different organizations that you work with? How did you see the responsibilities and scope of work of your teams evolved as well? Yeah, that’s an interesting one. So I would say up until about two years ago, customer success managers were really focusing on retention. And I would say earlier on, if we’re talking about 15 years ago, they were doing everything. And again, this all is depends on like what stage is a software company? Are they series A, series B, series C?

I do want to preface that. But they were doing everything. They were doing the training, the onboarding, they were having the conversations with the customers throughout the year. I think upsell to a lesser extent was emphasized, traditionally speaking, and let’s just preface 2018. We’re in 2024. And since then, I would say there’s more functional expertise, even within the CS space. So there’s training experts, there’s onboarding. Support is not something that just CSMs are doing everything for. There’s also separated out support. And then from an upsell perspective, there’s the focus of we all know that once you land a customer, especially an enterprise customer, which is where most of my expertise is. 5 million. I myself have actively been very successful at doing that because customers year over year, as you want them to be with you for 10 years, but they really see me as a trusted advisor.

They’ve heard me explain why I think they need X product as an add-on. They’ve also heard me say, well, this might not be something that my company has appreciated, but I know the customers even like me more. I’ve told customers you don’t need to buy that additional product. So save your money. And my sales rep have been like, what did you just say? And then my customers, like, well, because you said that, I kind of want to buy something just because. Like I’ve never heard anyone say that. But it’s because I really care about my customers. I digress a little bit, but post-2018, I think the emphasis has been a lot about knowing that our customers will grow exponentially. If retention is high, we know that they’re gonna grow. They’re gonna grow 10x. That’s the theory. We’ve seen it statistically, we’ve seen facts about it across if I’m generalizing software as a service. I think there has been that shift, if you think pre-2018.

And I’m just putting 2018 out there. I feel like that’s where I personally saw like a big shift. And then I would say COVID time. So COVID was all about we’re all in growth mode. So let’s overhire CSMs, let’s put more resources towards things because it was grow at all costs. And then we came out of COVID, and I really think that 2023 was the year where all of a sudden people weren’t seeing that growth like they had in 20, 21, and 22. And so you start to see the decline. And as a result, everyone starts focusing on okay, how do we get more lean? And as a result, if you think about how customer success was focusing on retention and you always had a sales counterpart that really helped focus on the upsell, doing the commercial contracts as are related to those upsell opportunities, maybe two heads on each account. And I still see that in some companies, but for the most part, we’ve omitted that.

And some of the reason why I no longer have a job is not because I didn’t do a great job at Sensor Tower, but just because we had two teams and I was very much intimately involved with forecasting and supporting the AAM team, especially in North America, focusing on how the CSMs can enhance upsell opportunities by flagging signals. But then we decided to consolidate because the numbers weren’t there. We weren’t growing. The pre-sale side wasn’t growing. So it’s like, okay, we need to get lean. And as a result now, I think the shift is now customer success managers really need to understand how to sell as part of their role. And I don’t think that they’re not capable. I think they’ve all been doing it. I think we’re all in sales. And I think that we’ve been flagging upsell signals. We have customers who were like, hey, you don’t have this. And based on what I see as a pain point for you, a new surface pain point that might have not been there when you invested in us three years ago.

I think this makes sense for you to purchase this additional add-on. And they’re willing to listen to us, and more so than an AM coming who would just come in and say certain things that, to be honest, made me cringe. I’d be like, oh God, please don’t say that. But at the same time, the flip side of now a CSM having to focus on sales and growth is that we no longer have this good cop, bad cop situation. I always use the AEs or the AMs or however the sales side of things as like the person who was going to give the bad news. Nope, we’re not gonna give you that price. And I used to call myself really the consultant. I used to be like, I’m the one who actually knows the product really well. I’m the trusted advisor. And they would look to me sometimes and be like, Well, what do you think, Gina? Because I really pride myself on being an extension to their business. Like I wanted them to think that I almost worked as an employee for them, not a butts in a seat person, but I wanted them to feel like I cared about their business as much as their own employees.

I think this goes back to that consultative mindset that you mentioned earlier, right? And I think that a lot of the pushbacks, I’m saying this over and over in a lot of the conversations that I’ve had, is that a lot of the pushbacks on CS owning revenue is that they feel like we’re going to damage that relationships. And I think you gave a good example of how we used to leverage that dual relationship with a customer, where there is a salesperson and a CSM working with a customer. And we tend to play like that good cop, bad cop playbook to, I don’t know, to influence customers in some way. But like you said, we as in the CSM, the CSMs are actually in the best position to really help grow the account. Obviously, that’s from a company’s perspective, but from a customer’s perspective, we are in the best position to help them because we’ve been working from them from the start. We know what they need, we know what their challenges are, what they’re trying to solve for.

And if a good CSM knows when to put forward the right, should I say, solution for whatever challenges that it have, because I think the mindset shifts now into we’re not just selling for the point of selling or fulfilling a number. And I think that’s where a lot of maybe the pushback to this shift is happening. But let’s talk a little bit about your experience when you joined the organizations that you are in where you were leading CS teams. Did you join and they are already holding a revenue number? Or was that a shift that you’ve had to facilitate? It was a shift that I’ve had to facilitate. And I would say that they were holding a revenue number because they were held to gross revenue retention. Which is revenue, right? Exactly, which is revenue. So it’s been a shift. I do a lot of consulting for companies that are going through this shift. And one of the things that I kind of flag for them is that there needs to be a plan for how we go through this shift.

A couple of things that I think that are dismissed or not emphasized enough is some sales training for the CSMs. They’re not given the tools to really help them thrive. So having them go through sales training that an account manager would go through or an AE would go through as it relates to existing customer base. The other thing that I find it’s such a disconnect is comp structure. Customer success managers are not motivated or incentivized to focus on sales historically. However, with this shift, their comp structures are not necessarily being changed. And that’s horrible. We need to align everything. So you expect a higher net revenue retention number, and yet you’re not compensating them for that net revenue retention number as you are to those four people who were formerly account managers or AEs that were getting compensated in a different fashion. I’m seeing a lot of that as well.

The other thing is just understanding my approach to having conversations with customers is really focusing on you’re doing discovery or you should be doing discovery with your customers on an ongoing basis. So every time you talk to them, how is this product or how is this software being used in the company? How does it relate to the goals and objectives of the company? For how does it align with their 2025 strategy, right? That’s not a static, it’s not a one-time question. So when you see them again, have things changed? Have you had success with our product? What kind of success? And I emphasize the strategic component of it and not the transactional, like, oh, it’s helped us. Yes, there’s like easy wins, like this has made us more efficient. But like from a decision-making perspective, especially again, just keep in mind that I’ve worked for data intelligence software. What are the decisions that we’ve helped contribute to informing to make that decision?

And then leveraging some of those success stories to really evangelize not only why they need to renew with us, but what areas that we see based on all that discovery we’ve done where we can really sell into other areas that we’re not thinking of. So that’s not necessarily what I think of sales training. I think there’s sales acumen that I think every CSM should really have more of, have more exposure to if they haven’t. I think the ones that thrive as a CSM are ones who historically have been account managers and have been doing the sales component and then have transitioned into this one role instead of the separation. And where their adjustment is is the training, the onboarding, the kickoff. But I frankly think they probably do better because they’ve got the sales acumen already there. Right. Because I agree with you though, that the sales acumen is so important, not necessarily skills, just like that selling mindset.

Because, as you rightly said, in order to expand or to grow an account, it’s continuous value creation. So it’s not just like that initial phase where you showcase that initial value and it’s a done deal, right? You continue to understand how have their needs have evolved, how have their challenges changed, and continue to position your company to provide that value as they grow, as they scale as well as a company. And to be fair, I do believe that the best CSMs have that sales acumen already. And so probably that’s why you’re saying account managers transition very nicely into this, because I think the mindset is a little bit different. And we can dig into this a little bit more because I come from like a traditional CSM where we’re responsible for like the onboarding adoption and all of that. And early, like I said, more than 10 years ago, nobody ever thought about CSM encodas or CSM and upsell together.

Like that’s a sales thing. However, I do see that if you are a good CSM, you naturally have the basic foundational skill set that allows you to become an effective seller. It’s not about negotiation or not about all of those traditional selling skill sets that we talk about. I think discovery is one that’s not necessarily a sales skill set. And yet I think people who are good at discovery are going to be good salesmen because they start with digging deeper and understanding. Let’s talk a little bit about those sales training, because I agree with you. There is obviously still a gap, right? Because of the difference in mindset, the difference in scope of work. If you think about a team transitioning into this role where they have to carry a number, and you think about your team as well. You mentioned to me how you work a lot in mentoring and coaching your team members. How do you identify, do they have the right skill set?

And what is the gap? And how do I bridge that gap? Most of it to me is when you join a company, sales reps and account managers go through, when I speak about account managers, historically speaking, they go through sales training. They go through like, here’s the value proposition of this product, here’s how you articulate the value of it, here’s the counter-argument to what a customer would say, or prospect, I should say. Here’s how our competitors do against us, but why we are superior or where our strengths are compared to our competitors. And none of that is really something, in my opinion, that I’ve seen CSNs traditionally go through. That’s what I mean by that. I think the other piece is, and this is an easier fix, it’s just like understanding pricing strategy and like how we sell our products and how we discount based on like multi-year versus a one-year contract and how to have those conversations around that, and how to discuss like end of quarter, closing upsells, if we’re talking about the post-sale side by deadline and getting it ahead of time and having to get a little bit more aggressive around those conversations.

And then also having some really like when I told you earlier, I cringe sometimes when I heard a sales rep say something that I would never feel comfortable saying. And this was again years ago, but I can empathize with CSMs now having to cringe and feel that way, but you got to get comfortable. I’m now very comfortable doing it, but it’s something you have to learn. It doesn’t necessarily come automatically to many, just because you do want to be the empathetic person who’s working with your customer and you want to see that success for your customer. And I think it’s a little bit hard. That’s what I mean when I’m talking about the lack of. I would actually say, going back to what you said about like an account manager being a better CSM, I do see that now just because of how we define customer success. However, I actually think really good customer success managers, if we think pre-2022, the best ones were the ones that really cared about their customers.

And you saw things go from like 1X to 10x because they positioned it. They flagged those upsell signals so beautifully. I think really good account managers are really good because they’re aggressive and they are in there for the kill. They are going, they’re hunting. They’re gonna go into Google and attack every global market. They’re gonna attack EMIA separately, they’re gonna attack, and they are hustlers. Okay. I’ve worked with some amazing account managers that are like a Chinese calendar year younger than me and are some of the remind me of my hunger at an earlier time in my career. I think the unicorns that you find are the ones that can do both very well. They’re a few and far between. I mean, that’s what unicorns are, right? They’re few and far between. I think you’re gonna be on the spectrum in terms of like where your strength is. Like some are gonna be better at the adoption, the usage, the happy customer who does renew year over year.

And then others are gonna be better about growing accounts. I think we need to hone in on those skills. Like, I think account managers are probably learning how to be CSNs. And okay, so how are we driving value? How are we driving adoption? What clever tactics are you using to get our customers back into the platform? There’s a level of creativity to all of this that I think both sides need to learn. But the unicorns tend to be like when you can find one, they’re amazing to have on your team. And I have found some, but I haven’t found many. I agree. That’s totally true. And there’s so many things I like to unpack in what you just said there. But just coming off from your most recent sentiment, I agree. And I think I saw a LinkedIn post or a video on LinkedIn. The question was: is it easier for an AM to transition to a CSM or a CSM to transition to an AM or something of that effect, something similar to what we’re talking about, where we’re saying they both have their strengths, actually.

And I think we have to acknowledge that they come from different mindsets, they come from different compensation structures. We have yet to dive into that. They come from a different culture and they have a different approach when they work with customers. And I think that the best of both worlds, like you said, will blend seamlessly. But the thing is, I agree with you, it’s very hard to find this unicorn. And on top of that, you want somebody who’s also very good at your product. So make that even harder to find and um hire for. So I totally agree with you. And I like that you made that differentiation about what is a good AM and what is a good CSM. Because I think that at the end of the day, they’re both in service of growing the customer. It’s just different approaches. And you kind of like have to meld and find how your teams or like that middle ground where your teams are able to do that in a scalable way or in a consistent basis.

But I also want to go back to what you said earlier around training. I like to applaud you on that because in a lot of my previous podcast episodes, a lot of the training that every time we talk about sales enablement for CS, we talk about traditional enablement for skills. And that’s why I started talking about like negotiation skills and what are the other skills that were often mentioned by people. And you talked about just like the framework and the content around that, because the negotiation skills and all of the soft skills come into play, but you have to have that basic understanding of what your products do, what your value proposition is, how is it different from your competitors? That is basic training. I agree with you. Don’t necessarily come or becomes a part of CS enablement for any new CSMs. And based on your experience, typically before all this, how does a typical CSM enablement go?

And how do you think we should improve that now in the context of they actually have to drive revenue too? So there’s additional enablement that we have to put in place for every time you onboard a new CSM into your organization. To your point, yes, CSMs were never given that sales training. I think enablement needs to include what we just described that the sales team gets. So that I think CSMs, the focus is on like, okay, you need to learn the platform and be the expert on the platform. So it’s almost like it’s like an engineer. You need to understand the back engine of things and everything else and understand how it works as it relates to the user interface. But you’re not talking about the value proposition, how we compare to our competitors. You don’t know any of that. So I’m not saying that CSMs don’t get some of that in sales in the enablement, internal enablement when they join a company, but it’s to a much lesser extent.

So I would say it definitely needs to include both the pre-sales side and the post-sales side to be better at being able to do what this new defined role is for a CS. The other thing I wanted to say, it’s a very unique differentiation that I learned early on in my CS career, is that when a CSM is, let’s say, walking a customer through training, a lot of times, and this is personally, I think it’s not a best practice. You shouldn’t be doing this, but they train feature function. They don’t provide the story. So I think CSM should be providing a story. And with it, you learn how to use the product. It’s storytelling. It’s not like now you click this button to get this. It’s telling the story, and yes, clicking the button to show them a view that then further enhances the story that you’re talking them through during a demo or a walking training session. On the flip side, on the pre sales side, so not post sales funnel, but on the pre sale side, when someone is talking to a prospect, they’re not really doing the storytelling.

They’re not doing the feature function, but they’re speaking about the product in a very different way than someone who has a customer. Selling a product, the talk track is different than when you have the customer and you’re showing them how to use it. When you’re using it, there needs to be the storytelling as it relates to customers that are already using it. You’re focusing on use cases and like some workaround versus the value selling that you’re constantly doing in the beginning. In the end, when you’re doing a training for, let’s say, a bunch of users, you are highlighting the value, but you’re not constantly doing it in the same way, I think, that an account executive would do. I just wanted to call that out. And something I learned early on that I was like, that’s really important. Right. That’s a good call out because the psychology of selling to a new buyer is different. I think this is what you’re alluding to, right?

That the psychology of selling or actually the buying psychology. Let’s talk about that. The buying psychology of a new seller is different from an existing customer. And it’s very interesting because I also just had this recent workshop on value and ROI showcase. And that’s why I aligned with a lot of the things that you said there, where we talk about you go beyond the feature and the functions, and you actually talk about the value. It’s not just about how does one function, but what’s in it for me if I use that feature? And the storytelling piece is so important when it comes to showcasing value because, as we said earlier as well, right, that the expansion play is a continuous value creation play. It’s just about consistently showing them that there’s more value that they can get from your product. And if you focus on how do you paint that picture through storytelling, which I think also is one of those skills that are not very much highlighted from a CSM perspective, storytelling, maybe because storytelling is not the right word, but that’s also typically the word that I use too.

But just that painting, that picture of the value and the long-term, should I say, long-term benefits of using your product or your service. Okay, there’s so much that I like to unpack. And I actually love that how this conversation went, went so much different from all the previous podcasts, that that podcast episode that has aired in this podcast, as you know, Gina, we talk a lot about transitioning teams into driving revenue. And I love how a lot of the things that you mentioned here were not a repetition of what previous people said. So there’s a couple of things that I like, like you said, around the storytelling, the importance of storytelling, the importance of that consultative mindset, as well as the AM and the CSM differentiation, but also that mindset of enabling your CSMs to be successful in this, let’s say this new shift, like this new status quo that we now have to operate in.

If there is one piece of advice that you’d like to give to any maybe CS leader that has to navigate this change with a team, what is it that you can give them? One piece of advice. I would say have a transition plan, a plan for how you are going to prepare them for this switch. So with Sensor Tower, the team was told that they were making this switch and there was a good four-month runway of okay, you’re managing accounts. So for the next four months, it’s status quo. But come January, this is going to be the expectation. And to get you there, here are the things that we’re going to do. So having a project plan, CSM should be kings and queens of project planning for your customers. Project plan a timeline for what are the basic foundational elements of an account manager that are missing in what the current roles and responsibilities are of the CS team. And then get the support you need to make sure that that is presented, provided, and whether that be role-playing, whatever kind of training format is determined depending on the needs.

And then the second piece, I know you said one, but making sure that the compensation aligns for the next year to make customer success managers feel like, okay, if I’m going to be doing these additional things and I’m being held to a quota, right, for growth and not only a retention number, but the growth number that the compensation reflects just that. I love it. Thank you so much, Gina, for such a thoughtful and engaging discussion. I personally learned a lot from this as well. And it’s been great having you here. I know our listeners will walk away with a lot of actionable ideas. So before we conclude, can you tell us where our audience can connect with you? You can find me on LinkedIn, but my email address is actually pretty easy. com. And your name is the Italian version of Gina, G-I-N-A. com. Awesome. We’re going to link your details and your LinkedIn profile on the show notes. Thank you so much for our time again, Gina.

It was a great discussion. Thank you for having me. com. I specialize in working with customer success leaders who carry your revenue number, and I look forward to helping you confidently run a revenue generating customer success team. Don’t forget to connect with us on LinkedIn and join our Customer Success Leaders Hub for more discussions, resources, and networking opportunities. You can access the links on the show notes. See you next episode.